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> True, software development has faster hype cycles than other professions such as medical or legal professions. Medical and legal are not having hype cycles t

> True, software development has faster hype cycles than other professions such as medical or legal professions. Medical and legal are not having hype cycles that need to be kept up with in this way. They each have processes to test if a change is positive and then implement the change. For legal it is initially jurisdictional and not going with the change in the jurisdiction it happened is malpractice, yet not knowing the basics of New Orleans law in New York is normal. > Keeping your head down and ignoring new developments is simply malpractice. My general doctor knows nothing that is happening in the field of foot surgery (unless he injured his own foot.) Many of the complaints I see about people not keeping up is about people who are well aware of more alternatives and more details in the alternatives than the person complaining. I was quite shocked at the seeming ignorance when my company selected new window environments or revision control a number of years back. But they all knew more about more than one via previous choices the company had used in the decades before than I knew about subversion and git or gnome and kde. Many of the details I assumed would be relevant to transitioning were never particularly relevant to them. Any of them learning too much about the choice not chosen was pretty irrelevant and could become negative if it developed into pointless complaining once the consensus occurred.

speedplane 7y ago
> Medical and legal are not having hype cycles that need to be kept up with in this way. Medical and legal professions both have strong centralized authority. In the medical field, it's the professional organizations, in legal it's the judges, for architects there are safety and standards organizations. Software development doesn't have any such central authority, and the entire profession is also heavily influenced by biased business interests. So there's definitely a lot more BS and hype that floats around in software development. That said, just because it's harder to keep up and filter the real from the BS in software development, doesn't give you a pass to ignore it.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Sure it does. Anyone can write a blog post about why you should do X, and then they write another blog post 5 years later about "Boy was I an idiot for suggesting X, do Y instead!"
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > Anyone can write a blog post about why you should do X, and then they write another blog post 5 years later about "Boy was I an idiot for suggesting X, do Y instead!" Scientific literature does this all the time: they put forth a theory and evidence for it, and 5 years later write why they were wrong. But if the lesson is to not spend too much time on unreputable blog posts, I agree.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  We have plenty of central authorities for the technical fields, for example IETF, IEEE, W3C all have systems for creating filtered papers and standards.. There is plenty to keep up with in applied CS that is the same as in medical and legal. There is just a tendency to tell us we need to find the diamonds in the BS in topics that an average doctor or lawyer would ignore until an institutional change occurs after a consensus.

speedplane 7y ago

> Medical and legal are not having hype cycles that need to be kept up with in this way. Medical and legal professions both have strong centralized authority. In the medical field, it's the professional organizations, in legal it's the judges, for architects there are safety and standards organizations. Software development doesn't have any such central authority, and the entire profession is also heavily influenced by biased business interests. So there's definitely a lot more BS and hype that floats around in software development. That said, just because it's harder to keep up and filter the real from the BS in software development, doesn't give you a pass to ignore it.

oh_sigh 7y ago
Sure it does. Anyone can write a blog post about why you should do X, and then they write another blog post 5 years later about "Boy was I an idiot for suggesting X, do Y instead!"
- speedplane 7y ago
  > Anyone can write a blog post about why you should do X, and then they write another blog post 5 years later about "Boy was I an idiot for suggesting X, do Y instead!" Scientific literature does this all the time: they put forth a theory and evidence for it, and 5 years later write why they were wrong. But if the lesson is to not spend too much time on unreputable blog posts, I agree.
yabadabadoes 7y ago
We have plenty of central authorities for the technical fields, for example IETF, IEEE, W3C all have systems for creating filtered papers and standards.. There is plenty to keep up with in applied CS that is the same as in medical and legal. There is just a tendency to tell us we need to find the diamonds in the BS in topics that an average doctor or lawyer would ignore until an institutional change occurs after a consensus.